A skin pack is a great way to give your computer a completely new look without the need to fiddle with endless settings or designing your own icons and backgrounds. Rather than having to go to the trouble of using one tool to change your icons, another to change your desktop theme and yet another to apply other tweaks, a skin pack represents a great way to give Windows a serious makeover with very little effort.

8 Skin Pack enables you get the look of Windows 8 by installing a new desktop theme, changing your desktop wallpaper and installing a new set of icons. But it does not end there. The skin pack goes a great deal further, enabling you to work with a completely new Start menu and feel the benefit of some of Windows 8’s new visual effects.

There’s also a new boot screen and login screen, a customized version of Windows Explorer and much more to work with. The skin pack gives you the opportunity to try out the new Metro interface of Windows 8 without the need to replace your existing copy of Windows with the developer preview or fiddle with virtual machines.

It is worth noting that the installation of the Skin Pack includes the Incredibar toolbar as standard. If you would prefer not to install this, take care to select the Custom Installation options at the start of the setup routine as this will enable you to deselect all of the options relating to Incredibar. It is also worth noting that this is an online version the installer which will check online to ensure that you have the latest version of the pack. There are 32- and 64-bit versions of the software available, as well as a special version for Windows XP user, so take care to install the version that is most appropriate for your system.

Verdict:

If you don’t want to install the developer preview of Windows 8, this is the perfect way to get the look of the upcoming operating system .

There's a vast amount to learn, of course, and that's even before you start building your game. But there's plenty of documentation, tutorials, demos and sample projects to point you in the right direction.

The package is now entirely free, too - no annoying limitations, nag screens or anything else. Epic now only requires that you pay a 5% royalty after the first $3,000 of revenue per product per quarter. And even then, you "pay no royalty for film projects, contracting and consulting projects such as architecture, simulation and visualization."